Journal Day 31

Well, last night I made the mistake of procrastinating and leaving it until this morning to write about yesterday’s entry. Because of that, I spent maybe 3-4 hours writing Day 30 of my journal entries. So tonight, I’m not going to make the same mistake and leave it until tomorrow morning to write about today.

I woke up this morning and immediately began doing the rest of the tasks in Phase 1 – Organize. I left my computer on from the night before and had all my files backed up. I deleted a lot of different files, and I also dug through my old pictures and journal entries. My thoughts on these I wrote about in Day 30. I spent a good chunk of my morning and noon writing that journal entry, it was long. Afterwards, I got started on Phase 2 – CS 1101 Week 2 Homework.

Selfie for the day *yawn*

Phase 2 was extremely easy. There was one programming assignment involved, and it was the first task I completed, did it all in around 1 minute. It just involved creating a program that calculated a triangle’s area.

After being satisfied with the programming assignment, I went to go walk outside for a bit. It was a good day outside, cold, and yet the sun was shining. I called up a friend during the walk, the same one who came by during my 21st birthday and was also the person who borrowed my Pragmatic Programmer book and Windows 8.1 installation CD, I wanted both of those back. On the phone we got into a lot of arguments, he loves arguing me and blaming me for his personal problems like not having a job.

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Despite him constantly blaming me and getting into arguments all the time, basically every time we talk, I stick with him because he is extremely reliable. If I am stranded somewhere, and he is working, and I call him, he will leave work and pick me up. If I need to borrow money, for whatever reason, he’ll give me money for free. There isn’t a thing I can’t rely on him for. My family of 3 has only 2 cars, sometimes both of them are gone and I’m left with nothing. I’ve called him a few times early in the AM to disturb his sleep to get a ride to work, and he never complains and always gives me a ride. He told me to come over, and I wanted to because I needed my things back.

I have no idea why he is that way, but he is very selfless to anyone that he knows. I feel bad that I put him down today. So when I arrived by walking over to his house, it’s a 5 minute drive or a 45 minute walk, I saw him and his brother watching television. I immediately just called him out on it, “why are you blaming me that you don’t have a job, when you’re here watching television all day? You’re doing the exact opposite of what you should be doing.” They were watching a comedy and they were laughing a few times during my talking, but after 10 minutes of this I noticed the laughter reduced or died down completely. My friend and I got into a heated discussion again.

We talked for maybe 20 minutes, I told him how I came by to get my stuff and that I didn’t enjoy just wasting time watching television. He told me to enjoy my life, that I needed to get out more because I was wasting my life. Oh yeah, we have totally polar opposite views. He wants the same things I want, but he does the exact opposite things to get them. Like I said, he wanted a job, but here he was watching television all day and doesn’t remember the last time he applied for anything.

But again, despite our clashing ideologies, he’s extremely reliable. He let me go upstairs and just look around his room for my Windows 8.1 CD. I found it in the CD drive of an old desktop, I had to use the power cable of another computer to turn it on. Man, I remember he let me treat this place as a second home a few months back, he literally did not care what I did here. Just amazing, because I wouldn’t let him do whatever in my own home, I have many restrictions for him, but he had none for me.

Eventually we drove to his cousin’s workplace and him and his cousin went outside to smoke. I was there, and I started discussing smoking with my opposite friend. This guy said a few months back he wanted to stop smoking, but today here he was, smoking. So we argued a lot again, we always argue. I tried to use logic to get him to stop smoking, but he only smoked more. On the drive back home he told me that the conversation made him think and he had to ask himself why he did the opposite of what he wanted to accomplish. I took his lighters from his car, there were no more cigarettes left, and threw them in the garbage when I arrived home.

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I started doing the reading assignments, the self quiz, and the learning journal, in that order when I got back home. Nothing special to write about there. The assignments were extremely easy, a cake walk. The only problem was that they took a lot of time to complete, I spent another 6 hours or so doing these remaining assignments that were again easy, but long.

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After doing all my homework for CS 1101, I was pretty tired, I wanted to go outside and walk for a bit before going to sleep, but I knew it was freezing cold outside so I hesitated. Good thing I did, because Observant Bystander sent me a message. She told me she read my Day 29 entry which I was happy for, and she also let in that she couldn’t support me as much she was very busy and stressed. Well as a friend for life, that’s what I was there for.

She let me know how busy she was by telling me all these events and responsibilities she was going through in her life. I thought those were pretty normal, so I told her that. Then she let in the real issue of what was really upsetting her and it was because of two main things, both of them were world crumbling events in which everything in the world you understand seems to collapse. I’ve had my own world crumbling events happen to me, and I’ve heard personal stories of it from other people. The issues she’s facing in my opinion aren’t anywhere near as big as some I’ve gone through or ones I’ve heard from other’s, but they’re still a lot to go through for someone her age. It’s all part of maturing.

Throughout her journal she’s been writing about having played on an online server, she’d usually spend her afternoons and evenings after school playing on it. She knows everyone on the server and is popular there, she even became an admin. But this server was starting to die and if it dies, it means no more server for Observant Bystander. I told her she can always join another one or make one herself, plus she probably won’t be playing that game in 7 years.

But the biggest issue she was facing was something very personal, I don’t want to mention it explicitly. I tried my best to comfort her, but it just stressed her out even more. I find out in hindsight that she was actually crying several times throughout the night, she wrote about it in her journal. I knew she was upset, but I couldn’t tell how much just from her sending me messages alone. She apologized for being upset and emotional tonight, and I said that was fine. We wished each other good night.

Her journal entry of being upset today was almost a complete reverse of her happy journal entry yesterday. What I find interesting is that I can actually read about her day and about her thoughts and experiences. She also writes about me whenever we have our exchanges, and I can view our conversations from her point of view. I have no idea if she even knows I’ve written about her on my journal entries, she says she mostly skims them or only reads the important parts because they’re long. She should let me know in some way that she reads these sections about her, I actually put in more effort to be accurate because of that possibility.